How to setup keyboard shortcuts to easily switch between language input methods in Mac OS X

If you use more than one language for text input, it is necessary to enable keyboard shortcuts in order to switch between the input methods easily and quickly. In Mac OS X, keyboard shortcuts to switch between different language input methods are disable by default. To enable them, open System Preferences and select the “Language & Text” option:

Select the “Input Sources” tab and click on the “Keyboard Shortcuts…” button on the right. This will bring you to the System Preferences menu for keyboard shortcut. Select the item “Keyboard & Text Input” on the left:

You can see that by default the options “Select the previous input source” and “Select next source in input menu” are not enabled. Click on the check boxes to enable these two options:

The system will display yellow triangle icon to warn you that the default shortcut key Command-Space and Option-Command-Space are in used. Command -Space is actually the default used by Spotlight thus we need to change the keys.

To change the keys assigned to the shortcuts, simply double-click on the shortcuts and type in the new shortcut keys. You can use the key Command-[ and Command-] for the shortcuts as shown below:

Once the shortcut keys are defined, you can switch between them by pressing the Command-[ or Command-] keys.